About This Site

This is a reference site for mid-level photographers - for folk who themselves have some macro photography experience, and who want some avenues to explore to be able to move into extreme macro. Ie, what the techniques are, what options there are and what equipment we use. It covers optics, flash, lighting, equipment, diffusers, stages, stacking, software, insectology & more, and is put together by me, Johan J. Ingles-Le Nobel.

extreme-macro.co.uk was a Webby nominee site in 2014. The Webbys are considered the Internet most prestigious 'web design' award, and extreme-macro.co.uk was one of only 60 sites that made it as far as official 'nominee' in 2014. Other nominees included Google, GoPro, NY Times, Hulu, TripAdvisor, Wired, RollingStone, PBS, YouTube, Buzzfeed, The Guardian.

I sincerely hope that the site is useful to you!

And on a more personal note, this is a one man effort and of course any assistance would be highly appreciated. Please... if the site has been useful to you, and you want to help it, here are 3 ways that you can help make it better, all of which generally involve minimum effort. Your support is highly appreciated - it makes a massive difference!

Please Correct Site Errors

Errors happen. When you sit down and do a 200 page site then inevitably, somewhere along the way, errors do start to be made. These can be errors in the actual writeups (where I'm mistaken) or website errors (spelling, missing graphics etc). My top priority is putting out accurate, useful information. It helps tremendously if people let me know about errors. This is my experience and I don't pretend to know everything. All I can do is put down my own experiences which I have done. If you see something that could be improved, for goodness sake get in touch and point it out! I'm constantly amazed more people don't disagree with me more.

Please Share Your Experience

Anyone can share their experience by using the 'add comment' doodah at the bottom of pages. I always envisaged this site to become a collection of 'shared experiences' for the benefit of all, rather than just me pontificating, and your experience with any of the material that I've written about, matters. I'm well aware that there are people who have much more experience than me -- your input is invaluable!

Site

In response to technical queries, the articles section of the site does not use a content management system and is not on wordpress. The bulk of the content was written at night and over weekends between q2/2012 and q4/2013. The site is on fasthosts hosting and uses zoomsearch (which makes a search of the whole site and linked pages), a modified version of commentics for all the 'add comment' functionality, awkwardgroup's slider on the homepage and textpattern cms/blogging software for "The Extremist" blog section. Beyond that it is based on the 960 grid system and is all flatfile HTML5, PHP and CSS3, using include() all over the place to make my life a lot easier and keep me vaguely sane. Future plans for the site are in flux but the site does cost me money to maintain, so I may add sponsorship and affiliate links in due course. Extreme-macro.co.uk was a Webby award nominee in 2014.

Twitter

I am experimenting a bit with Twitter, and tweeting out some of the publicly accessible extreme macro RSS feeds that seem to be around online. All the images that I tweet out link back to the original image and should bring you, the photographer more eyeballs and hopefully more publicity. I believe that this can only help you as photographer but if you do not want your photo to appear in the @ExtremeMacro twitter feed, then just include the word "nopost" anywhere in the description and title, and the filter that I have set should stop it from showing. The photos are now only taken from Flickr groups that I have run and administered for many years (studio stacks and field stacks), and part of the precondision for posting there and agreeing to the group is giving permission to post here.

Article Rating

Please feel free to rate articles, in fact I would encourage you to do so. To rate an article, use the "add comment" option - the rating field is one of the fields that you fill in at that time. If it's a shocker it would be helpful if you gave an indication of what the issue is or what else needs to be added. This gives me something to work with, thank you.

Cookies

You can opt out of Google's ad tracking which serves you ads on adsense remarketing sites based on your web activity tracked through its analytics which I employ here. Most websites you visit will use cookies in order to improve your user experience by enabling that website to 'remember' you, either for the duration of your visit (using a 'session cookie') or for repeat visits (using a 'persistent cookie'). Cookies do lots of different jobs, like letting you navigate between pages efficiently, storing your preferences, and generally improving your experience of a website. Cookies make the interaction between you and the website faster and easier, and allow the webmaster to analyse user behaviour to see where things maybe going right or wrong. I use cookies for this purpose on this site but I don't like the advertising cookies that feed you ads based on your browsing history. Hence the link above to opting out of Google's advertising machine, which I recommend.

Copying stuff- please play nice =)

If you are looking to copy pages, all I ask is a simple link back. This site is my hard work and has taken a tremendous amount of time to get right. If you do copy stuff from here please can you reference back to the page that it came from, ie like: from: "XYZ" (extreme-macro.co.uk), with permission - where "XYZ" is the page tag (the page name at the end of the breadcrumb on every page, the home >> section >> section >> tag bit at the top) and "XYZ" has a link over it to the URL, which should be of a "dofollow" variety. This will take you all of three minutes so I'd appreciate your small effort in this as a small web thank you for copying my stuff. Please play nice =)

Example, if you borrowed from this page, you'd do: from: "About This Site" (extreme-macro.co.uk), with permission

"ZoomSpider - wrensoft.com [ZSEBOT]"

For webmasters: I use zoomsearch to provide an extreme macro specific search engine on these pages which should identify itself as "ZoomSpider - wrensoft.com [ZSEBOT]" in your logs. It is in your interest to let this through as I only ever link out to other sites (ie bringing you visitors) using the search facility. This is completely automated: it runs on my PC at 5.30am, scans the whole site and any pages linked to, and FTPs it up to the site (to always be up to date). This is absolutely not a scraper, all it does it look at the links on this site and if, for example you mention JML, then should anyone search JML at the top of my pages then your page would show in the result and hopefully the person might find whatever information they are looking for by also checking your site. If this is a problem then just ping me a mail and I will of course remove the link to your site.

About Me

Daddy to Laurence and Emma and husband to my long suffering and patient wife Nini, I work as a manager in an IT & Telecoms company by day but I am a photographer by night. Before I did a couple of proper degrees at St.Andrews, I was trained in photography by Ken Light at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco where I had a work scholarship back in the 80s, but I didn't pick up a camera after than for 20 years! A Dutchman living in Surrey England, since rediscovering photography with a digital camera I have been lucky enough to have had my macro work on the front page of Flickr a few times, and featured on the BBC, La Republica, The South China Morning Post, outdoorphotographer.com, F Stoppers, Lightstalking, The Photography Blogger, Photography Vox, Cognysis, Wertn.com, PM.net, The Smithsonian Magazine, "I F*cking Love Science" webzine, Pentax Premiere Gallery, Pentax Exclusive Gallery, Pentaxforums and in the local media, together with a variety of other online media. In 2015 my work has been exhibited in London, Newcastle, Stockport, Bristol, Reading, Weybridge, Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, Peterborough and Uxbridge and I was made a Pentax Ambassador in August of the same year. I work closely with various photography-related manufacturers, providing external quality review, product improvement and new product development services. I am also an external photography book reviewer for two publishers. Extreme-macro.co.uk is entirely my own written work, and I assert full copyright over all content and images.

Extreme Macro Talks

In response to many requests, I do give evening talks to photography clubs about extreme macro, with a presentation that covers many aspects of extreme macro, both challenges and solutions, includes some entomology and a focus stack walk through, and includes some of my own photography as well. I will also bring along some of the fairly unusual equipment that we use, for example for club members to have a try at focusing an MPE65 lens. My talks tend to be more teaching about extreme macro rather than showing pictures,but they do tend to go down well and they somehow manage to cater for all levels of photographers. Note this is a paid engagement - please contact me via this site if you wish to have me give a talk to your club. This is a comment from a Kingston Camera Club, I have also given talks at Wimbourne, Dorking and Reigate, and have others booked in the future.

It is my pleasure to write on behalf of Kingston Camera Club to say a big thank you for your very interesting lecture last night. I know you don't take on many lecturing engagements so we were especially lucky to have you. You were very generous with sharing your tips and information and gave a very clear explanation of what is a rather complex technical subject. We even had a few laughs and saw some great images along the way. It is such a good idea to bring along the kit and show this - that really brings things to life. It is so encouraging that so much can be done with a bit of resourcefulness rather than just expensive shopping. You clearly have a great passion for your subject as well as a huge depth of knowledge and practical expertise. I for one have been dabbling in macro (at the more close up rather than extreme end) and the challenges are all too familiar - just greatly amplified as you get more extreme. I have a feeling we will be seeing lots of bug pictures coming up at the club - especially with eyes either side of a blade of grass! so beautiful! So, many thanks and we wish you every success with your photography.

Macro Workshop

I also run macro workshops, a new venture for 2017, which have a maximum class size of 2 and we can cover anything macro that you'd like help with. The workshops are held at my home and the surrounding Surrey Hills, and can be a half day or full day. Please see here for more information about the macro workshops.

Professional Photography Services

If you have a professional macro photography project in the 1:1 to 10:1 range with which you need assistance, I am always open to interesting projects. I am able to offer consultancy, bespoke workshops and tuition and/or create high resolution images ready for you to use. Please contact me via this website with project details for an estimate and to take the conversation further.

Standard Disclaimer

The standard spiel. "The information and opinions within this website are for educational purposes. They are not intended to be relied on or treated as a substitute for specific advice relevant to particular circumstances. I accept no responsibility for any errors, omissions or misleading statements on this website, or for any loss which may arise from reliance on materials contained on this website. Certain parts of this site may link to external Internet sites, and other external Internet sites may link to this website. I am not responsible for the content of any external Internet sites."

Sniping Link

In order to obtain free snipes, this is a services that requires you post a link. Hence I have a link here to eBay sniper , an eBay sniping service.

Comments

Just for the record I do occasionally edit and change your comments before they are released from the moderation queue, but this is for technical reasons and I don't change the meaning. The editor just doesn't do line endings or paragraphs very well and links get split if they fall halfway at the point where your comment is added to the right of the page and truncated, so I have to sometimes change the location so that URLs are not in the first 120 characters. That's all, no other sinister reason. Your understanding is appreciated.

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Comments (7)

Inpirational , Johan. It gives me a lot of happiness when I read about somebody who worked in an unrelated sector, gets to achieve something in their passionate world at the same time. And when it is about helping the world by sharing info, its an entirely different level. I hope to participate. Thanking you, Nishandh

Hello Mike, thank you for your comments! Pentax image stabilisation (IS) is irrelevant to my macro work: for butterfly type/range shots I'd use a fill in flash and tripod, and for real close-up extreme macro I rely completely on a ringflash or short duration manual flash setting. As you know, you don't need to use IS with flash or on a tripod. Maybe if I were to shoot just natural light I'd use it, but I usually always at least have some flash or other light source going on somewhere!

I am not a Pentax user but there is a more general point here. As a film user, in the early days of mass digital photography, I often thought how useful IS would be in locations where flash was unwelcome, or would draw unwelcome attention. My EM-1 and EP-2 have IS in the camera bodies. This gives me the function with system lenses but, more importantly, also gives me it with any legacy lens I can fit to my cameras. It is mostly with the latter that I have found that it made sharp images possible with daylight macro at quite slow shutter speeds.